Murders at Hollings General ddb-1

by Jerry Labriola

  Eventually, he brought Kathy current on discoveries that had continued to baffle him.

  David had eaten his steak, but never tasted it. He had watched a TV movie with Kathy, but never saw it. Later, sleep came in spells.

  At six in the morning, he sprung up in bed. "That's it!" he cried.

  He felt Kathy's hand on his forearm. "What's the matter?" she said. "David, what's wrong?"

  "The dictionary! Of course. Where the hell have I been? Where is it, Kath?"

  "In the bookcase, but can't it wait till later? What's in the dictionary, for heaven's sake?"

  He stumbled into the living room, turned on a desk lamp and leafed through a Webster's New Collegiate Edition until he got to "C." A few pages along, he ran his fingers down eight columns of words starting with "can." Nothing caught his attention so he began the process again, this time more slowly. At the midway point, he passed a word, then returned to it as if he had overshot the mark: the finger equivalent of a double take. He slammed the dictionary shut and pumped his fist. The word was "canister." The silver canisters. "Yes!" he exclaimed aloud.

  His mind's eye focused on Victor Spritz's equipment room, his "Ambulance Without Wheels," with its spare parts and shelf of silver canisters. Six in all, and identical to the ones that had held gauze and cotton in a Navy treatment room years ago. He mouthed words and word fragments and suddenly realized he had forgotten the names of the two "Can" cities in Turkey. He returned to the bedroom, smiled at Kathy's deep breathing and, in the dark, groped for his pants.

  Back in the living room, he removed the index card from his wallet and now had all the pieces of the mosaic, he thought. He took one word at a time. "CAR" is "Cartagena," so we have "Cartagena Canister." "CAN" is either-he looked at the card-"Canakkale" or "Cankin. " So it's either "Canakkale Canister," or "Cankin Canister." And who care's, it's over there in Turkey. David rubbed his decision scar before editorializing. Where they grow the old opium poppy, and process it into heroin, and smuggle it all over the place, like in the old U.S. of A., to fry human brains. And the same for Cartagena, only we're not talking Colombian coffee here, we're talking cocaine, Big C, lady, nose candy. Candy to fry the same human brains.

  He wanted to leave immediately for Spritz's office but, at the same time, wanted to digest the events of the past day. And of the days before that. It was Saturday so he let Kathy sleep. Over coffee, he sat at her desk, took his notepad out from Friday and began to make notes which he would later polish to enter into his computer. He wrote about shipment dates, coded containers, drugs, murder suspects, loss of forensic support, excursions to known drug producing countries-estimating relevance, drawing lame conclusions, offering actions to consider. And he didn't know what to make of the Bernie/Marsha alliance, but since he had cast everyone he had come across lately as a killer, he characterized them temporarily as Bonnie and Clyde desperadoes.

  At eight-fifteen, he left for the hospital, charged with questions and few answers, determined to enter Spritz's office even if it meant breaking down the door. He had forgotten the Red Cross blood drive next door in Pathology. While working there two years ago, David was instrumental in expanding the drive to three mornings at a stretch and in having the doors open at eight.

  He walked into the Pathology wing and at the entrance to its large conference room, stopped to view donors lying on tables-two rows of four each-like live bodies in a morgue, their arms restrained and guarded by nurses in grey uniforms. The room's fluorescence was more than it could handle. David leaned against the archway, picking up the smell of alcohol sponges and smarting from the sting of needle insertions, while pink smocked ladies tended to plastic pouches bearing the Red Cross logo or to intravenous tubing and refrigerated white boxes. Men and women sat beside desks for screening interviews and blood pressure recordings; others waited in line.

  He winked at Marsha who looked up while interviewing the psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Corliss, but David didn't bother to address Nora Foster as she scurried from table to table and desk to desk, straightening tubing, whispering to volunteers. Nora had been the director of Hollings' blood drives for as long as David could remember.

  He watched the cool precision of bloodletting for only a minute because he had other matters on his mind. Deciding to take a shortcut to Spritz's office, he bypassed the labyrinth of laboratories and zigzagged through empty suites off a parallel corridor. The Saturday morning silence of the department's administrative rooms bothered him.

  In the last room before the hall to the EMS office, he came upon John Bartholomew, the hospital's chief microbiologist and a confidant during David's four years of Pathology there. Although Bartholomew was not an M.D., he was considered an expert in the clinical findings of infectious diseases as well as one of the area's top bacteriologists. He sat at a desk, pressing the telephone receiver down against his shoulder. David had often asked the veteran, skin-creased researcher how it felt to witness the laying of Hollings General's cornerstone in the century before.

  "Hey there, John, you're not whistling, what's up?" Startled, Bartholomew dropped the phone on the desk before replacing it in its cradle. His hands shook. "Oh, David, it's you. Sorry, I'm a bit jumpy." David narrowed his eyes. "Can I help?"

  The microbiologist appeared to welcome the question and said, "Can you keep a secret? I've been bottling it up too goddamned long."

  "Of course. You know better than to ask that." Bartholomew relaxed his shoulders. "Alton Foster just hung up on me. I called him at home. He still refuses to notify the County Health Department about something I think is an emergency-and I don't want to be a part of it any longer."

  David sat on the corner of the desk. "What emergency?"

  "You remember the botulism study we started just before you left here?"

  David nodded.

  "Well, it was expanded. We got a grant from CDC to see if we could find a way to improve the trivalent botulinum antitoxin."

  "And?"

  "As you know, you need clostridium bacilli to generate the toxin."

  "You're beating around the bush, John. What happened, you ran out of clostridium?"

  "Worse," Bartholomew said, swallowing audibly. "We kept it in a tube of thioglycolate broth, and it's gone."

  What do you mean, gone?"

  "Disappeared. I can't find it."

  "Since when?"

  "Thursday."

  David pulled at his ear until it hurt. Jesus Christ, now what, germ terrorism? He pushed himself away from the desk and paced. "Anybody else know about this?"

  "Just Foster. I called him immediately."

  "No one in the department knows?"

  "No. Remember, it was my baby, so nobody else paid much attention to it."

  "Hmm," David said, "and what's with Foster?" "He says I probably spilled it down the sink-which is ludicrous-and that the Health Department would only create panic if they heard about it. That they'd go to the press, ask a lot of questions around here. And he went on and on about the census of the hospital. He said the murders were more than enough to overcome-if we ever did-and we shouldn't scare people about something that probably didn't happen. David, it did happen. Someone stole the tube. I would have remembered spilling it. And there'd be an empty tube lying around."

  "The whole tube couldn't have been discarded accidentally somewhere, like in the trash can?"

  "I doubt it. " After a burst of eye blinks, the microbiologist repeated the phrase.

  David was well aware that botulism food poisoning was on the list of biological weapons reportedly stockpiled by international terrorist groups, along with anthrax, brucellosis and plague.

  "Look," he said, "don't do anything on your own quite yet. Let me speak to Foster-he sounds completely off base on this."

  "Tell him if he doesn't, I'm reporting the theft myself."

  "Hold off, John, I'll call him. You working today? "I'll be here till noon."

  "Good, I'll try to get back to you. If not, later. Now, don't do anything rash."<
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  David took his leave, walking more slowly now, as if uphill. A vial of poison had been added to a consciousness already scrambled with people, places and other things, including the silver canisters he hoped to examine momentarily.

  He had anticipated calling Security for a key to Victor Spritz's office, but he found the door unlocked, the overhead lights on. The status of the outer room was the same as when he looked in from the corridor ten days before: mostly empty and in general disarray. In the center was a table burdened by days of unopened mail. He danced around the litter on the floor.

  In the past, he had entered the back room on only a few occasions but now, approaching it, he clearly pictured the six canisters that had caught his attention each time. It was a large room, perhaps twenty-five feet square, and after he walked in and looked toward the shelf on the right wall, he arched back as if he had been shot. The canisters were not there.

  David put his hands on his hips and retreated in order to improve his view of the entire room. Like stalking prey, his eyes darted to all four corners, across and under tables, from cabinet tops to carton tops, and up along the ceiling, for good measure. Where are they?

  He tossed splints aside, looked behind aspirators, and moved stretchers stacked like furniture in storage. The more supplies and equipment he encountered, the more careless he became; oxygen tanks clanked against each other like bowling pins, metal drawers thwacked pulley weights, I.V. poles toppled over and bounced off his toes. He felt no pain, an obsessed hunter looking for round silver containers.

  Pillows and blankets were piled in a corner while, nearby, one blanket lay crumpled on a folding cot. Under a bench, he uncovered a leather trunk covered by a blue tarpaulin. The canisters are in there? Why? He yanked out the trunk, threw off its covering and opened it. Stuck into a clutter of books and manuals were a pair of bloody latex gloves, a roll of yellow tape and a woman's black

  Hollings

  Cardiac Defibrillator

  Vehicle

  It was a combination of curiosity, basic detection procedure and that sixth sense that drew him out into the crisp morning. He steadied his Minx against his chest and Friday against his thigh as he advanced toward the van.

  It was unlocked. He lifted one foot up to the floor before stopping short, barely able to maintain his balance. He felt his heart hammer on his chest wall and, swaying forward, caught the stench of gunpowder, blood and death. He tried breathing through his mouth but that only distilled the smell on his tongue. He settled on short expiratory grunts until adaptation kicked in.

  To the left, a male body lay doubled over, wedged between a folded stretcher and the floor, while lining an adjacent glass cabinet were the objects of his hunt minutes before, the objects he momentarily felt were anticlimactic. Except David knew better. Six silver canisters shone in the light that beamed over his shoulder.

  The body's face was obscured. David stooped and climbed into the van, tossing Friday toward the driver's seat to the right and sliding his Minx behind it. He didn't bother checking for a pulse because the exposed surfaces of the body felt cold, clammy and stiff. He righted the head with difficulty and flinched at the agonal face of Victor Spritz.

  David eased upright and for a split second-until his head tapped the ceiling of the van-he felt lifeless, detached, as if he were disembodied, suspended in some other location, but certainly not there, cramped in quarters too small for even average size men. In his day, he had treated many patients who had had acute anxiety attacks but he had never had one himself, and in a moment of self-diagnosis, reckoned that if he were disposed to having one, this discovery would have triggered it by now. He bent forward, probing the full extent of the body. Spritz was completely clothed and wore a blue windbreaker which David unzipped. Underneath, a tight sweater in bright yellow contrasted with streaks of desiccated blood. He palpated the chest, abdomen and all four extremities, and then pulled up the sweater and a shirt to inspect Spritz's exposed flanks and to press on his skin.

  There was a circular bullet entrance wound on the left side of his forehead with no surrounding gunpowder traces. A single bead of caked blood ran from the wound to the angle of his jaw like a crimson termite tunnel. David counted five other round entrance wounds through the sweater, two in the vicinity of the heart, two at the level of the navel and one at the right clavicular area. The one nearest the left heart border appeared to have sucked in threads of yellow fabric. He detected no soot smudges and estimated the shots came from a distance greater than fifteen to eighteen inches. Several pools of dark blood lay clotted on the floor and on the lap of the body.

  David braced himself against a side wall and calculated: full rigor mortis, fixed lividity, van temperature about thirty-five to forty degrees. Dead twelve to fourteen hours.

  He massaged his knee and, feeling the strain on both legs from maneuvering in a crouch, backed up to allow one leg to extend out the door, his foot to be planted on the snow-filmed macadam. His body spanned the length of steps in the van as he supported his weight on his hands and searched for other details before he would return inside for a closer look. He noted five spent shells to the right of the body and, tilting his head sharply to the side, identified a sixth one partially hidden by the wheel of a red metal crash cart. David reminded himself to refer to the shells as "empty brass" in talking with the police later. He combed the van like a robin looking for worms but found no gun.

  An electronic defibrillator which he knew was ordinarily stationed on the cart lay askew on the floor. The cart itself was tipped on its side, all five drawers exposed and emptied of drug bottles, vials and ampules; of scalpels, tape, airways and catheters; of syringes, suture materials and tourniquets. They were scattered about, some items intact but most crushed or bent out of shape.

  David returned his attention to Spritz's body. When he had forcibly lifted the head minutes earlier, it remained frozen in that position and now he had a better view of its neck. At Zone I, between the collarbone and the Adam's Apple, there was a straight-line bruise around the circumference. The bruise was broad and irregular in spots, wider in others. He noted several satellite markings above the line and some egg-shaped discolorations over the face and forehead. There were blotches on the backs of Spritz's hands which David interpreted as defense wounds.

  Strangled and shot. Shot? Riddled! He had heard about the difference between "stranger" murders with their trim format, and crimes of passion with their telltale evidence of anger and rage, of the repeated stabbings or shootings, of the usual conclusion that such a killer had a strong relationship with his or her victim. He wondered why the multiple shots hadn't been heard. No doubt a suppressor. Another baby nipple?

  In a matter of minutes, David had observed and acted swiftly, not peimi.tting himself time to react emotionally to his discovery. Quite aside from the violence of the murder, he grappled with the question of its relationship to the others in and about Hollings General. And his expectation of soon nabbing a killer had been dashed, as in the case of an athlete with a supposed insurmountable lead who then sees certain victory evaporate.

  Chapter 19

  David knew that within minutes of notifying others of Spritz's death, the area around the cardiac defibrillator van would be swarming with humanity, so he decided first to complete his snooping and then to place calls to Security, Foster and Kathy.

  He snapped on a pair of surgical gloves he took from Friday and went straight for the silver canisters. He picked one up and before opening it, looked at its undersurface. A strip of tape read, "CAR." The bottoms of two others were similarly labeled while those of the remaining three read, "CAN."

  In removing the lids, David treated each canister like a jack-in-the-box. All were stuffed with sealed glassine bags filled with white powder. The "CAR" powder appeared fine in texture; its bags, about four inches square, were unmarked. The "CAN" powder felt denser, more crystalline; its bags, tiny by comparison, measured no more than an inch by a half-inch and were stamped with
the word "HORNET" above a small lightning bolt. Spritz's trademark for the street, he thought. He hadn't gotten to the fine stuff yet. He opened representative bags and sniffed; the powders were odorless. He reminded himself that narcs never sample drugs, that the finger test was a creation for TV actors.

  His moves had been rapid, his reaction to the discovery matter-of-fact. After all the deliberations that had ultimately led him there, he never doubted drugs would be found somewhere along the way and that the fine powder was cocaine smuggled from Cartagena and the crystalline was heroin from Turkey. Yet, until now, he hadn't realized how small a cache of six canisters would be. If Victor Spritz was a trafficker, he told himself, there had to be a bigger supply around. Elementary, David. Any illusions of a supersleuth dissipated, however, for when he glanced back at the body-at the one who was once his key suspect-he felt as stymied as he was proud of the drug find. Plus not yet totally convinced all the murders were drug-related.

  But, the given was that Spritz was a narcotics dealer-perhaps mid-level-possibly below a bigger and more powerful supplier. Was it Charlie Bugles? Or someone still living? Is it the correct assumption in the first place? If so, did Spritz renege on a payment? Or is the assumption wrong and is this brutality the work of a simple junkie? No, the drugs hadn't been touched. Spritz's pockets hadn't been turned out.

  Another likely given was that Spritz wasn't your usual street peddler whose supply was limited at any one time, who maintained enough for, say, a few days' distribution and no more. On the other hand, a mid-level dealer would "connect" with such a person to dole out specified quantities, to monitor use, to retrieve cash payments, to exert control. No doubt, then: Spritz was either a mid-leveler or someone higher in the hierarchy-perhaps part of a far-reaching operation run by Bugles. Hell, they could have been on equal footing. After all: Colombia and Turkey.